Truman Capote

After a precocious start as a writer, Capote’s talent for self-publicity overshadowed his gifts as a stylist. Lee, a childhood friend, accompanied him researching murders in Kansas. Warhol was a starry-eyed admirer; Chaplin ‘adopted’ him in Hollywood. Capote travelled to Haiti with Greene, met Gide in Sicily, feuded with Mailer, and wrote dialogue for Huston. Allen cast him as winner of a Capote look-alike competition. Vidal and Capote perennially tried to upstage each other, Vidal calling his death a wise career-move. He found Faulkner unaccountably crying in his cold bath, and collapsed in Vonnegut’s house a week before he died.